A Marketing Plan for Steem v0.007 - kicking off a colaborative effort
I had rather made up my mind to write less about Steem and more about food, but after listening to a conversation between @aggroed and @justineh on Sunday, and being inspired by getting back on air with my new MSP show, I thought I would pen to paper and take a stab at this...
There are a few facts I believe we will all agree on...
- Steem needs more people.
- To get more people we need marketing.
- To do marketing effectively we need a marketing plan.
Beyond this the consensus probably begins to falter.
The what, the how, the who and the how much - let alone the where does the money come from - quickly move into stickier waters.
Picking up on the 'who', one answer may well be the Steem Foundation.
That is coming, but not just yet.
And even when it does, I am not sure it will be super optimal just to pile everything on the Foundation.
We can all play a part. We can all contribute. We can all collaborate.
This takes me to the purpose of this post...
To kick start a collaborative Marketing Plan for Steem.
I will layout what might stand as a workable framework to build a plan around. Broad headings, rough ideas, a few pointers of where to start.
Then I ask everyone with an interest in marketing Steem to contribute and make suggestions.
I will synthesise the input and recompile the plan.
With a few iterations hopefully we can come up with a fully workable plan. If any elements can be actioned along the way all the better.
Let's get started...
Who are we targeting?
- Investors
- Developers
- Content creators
- Content consumers
How do we reach each of these?
1. Investors
Investors need to be segmented into large and small. In the context of Steem's market cap perhaps over $100K might be considered in the large investor bracket.
There will be a further differentiation between individual investors and business / corporate investors. Different approaches are likely needed for each.
Possible marketing activities to attract investors...
a) Attendance and presentations at finance oriented crypto conferences
b) PR and advertorial in the crypto / financial press
c) Direct approaches to known crypto investors
d) Production of a 'Steem Investors Pack'
Any other ideas?
Who could work on these ideas?
This will need a team to be formed with the required specialist knowledge. Suggestions to help put this team together might include @theycallmedan, @starkerz, @aggroed, @fyrstikken, @broncnutz, @scaredycatguide and @thecryptodrive.
As well as finance/investment expertise, PR, copywriting and presentation skills will all be needed on the team.
Is this an area where the Steem Business Alliance could take the lead?
How would the work be funded?
The Steem Proposal System as a starting point, but also donations, upvoting and direct pitch to Steemit Inc maybe for specific activities.
2. Developers
This will include both individual developers with ideas for dapps and apps looking for a blockchain to build on, and full businesses with larger and more developed plans.
For both the benefits of developing on Steem will need to be packaged and well presented. These will include easy development environment, strong existing development community, fee-less and fast transactions, ready made audience for market testing and feedback...
Possible marketing activities to attract investors...
a) Attendance and presentations at tech oriented crypto conferences
b) PR and advertorial in the tech crypto and FOSS (free and open-source software) media
c) Running 'hackathon' type events
d) Production of a 'Steem Developers Pack'
Any other ideas?
Who could work on these ideas?
This will need a team to be formed with both development and business knowledge. Suggestions to help put this team together might include @therealwolf, @yabapmatt, @aggroed, @fredrikaa, @themarkymark, @inertia, @eonwarped, @theycallmedan. @starkerz and @thecryptodrive.
As well as development expertise, PR, copywriting, presentation and event planning skills will all be needed on the team.
Is this an area where the Steem Business Alliance could again take the lead?
How would the work be funded?
The Steem Proposal System as a starting point, but also donations, upvoting and direct pitch to Steemit Inc maybe for specific activities.
3. Content Creators
For the recruitment of Content Creators the emphasis of marketing should shift towards the individual apps and dapps, and now also the tribes.
Spending marketing effort to bring creators directly onto steemit.com without a much improved onboarding experience and some sort of formalised mentoring system is likely to be unrewarding because of very low retention rates.
The individual apps and tribes present a much more targeted opportunity for new creator acquisition. They can offer a more refined, more optimal and more supportive onboarding experience that is likely to have significantly higher retention rates.
Steempress has just published its strategy and roadmap for onboarding content creating bloggers en masse. This includes some strong marketing ideas that will hopefully be picked up by other apps and dapps such as an attractive referral scheme.
Marketing efforts to attract content creators should largely be focused therefore on supporting and perhaps co-ordinating the efforts of the dapps, apps and tribes.
This might require the formation of some sort of 'co-ordinating group' to...
a) Ensure good ideas are shared among all dapps, apps and tribes
b) Providing design, copywriting and commercial expertise for the production of publicity material and merchandise
c) Providing PR, copywriting and social media expertise for PR and social media marketing activities
d) Possibly providing guidance in other areas such as legal and event planning
Who could work on these ideas?
Suggestions for this type of co-ordinating advisory group might include @fredrikaa, @paulag, @zord189, @hungryhustle, @exyle, @jongolson, @taskmaster4450, @kay-leclerc, @ivyriane, @zipporah, @carrieallen, @ashtv, @hauptmann, @whatsup...
How would the work be funded?
The Steem Proposal System as a starting point, but also donations, upvoting and direct pitch to Steemit Inc maybe for specific activities.
4. Content Consumers (aka Curators, Readers, Viewers, Players)
As with Content Creators, the recruitment of new 'consumers' on the platform will likely be most effectively done via the individual apps, dapps and tribes.
They will be increasingly better equipped to offer a more targeted and supportive onboarding experience.
However steemit.com will continue to present a broad spectrum catch-all opportunity for new consumer (and creator) recruitment. How this is best served through marketing activities should be revisited after the arrival of Hive Communities and SMTs which should significantly enhance the user experience on steemit.com
In the meantime the emphasis of marketing for new consumers will best be done via the apps, dapps and tribes.
The requirements for some sort of 'co-ordinating group' will intertwine with those for marketing to new content creators.
It will be optimal therefore for that co-ordinating group to serve both marketing efforts which do significantly overlap - many consumers may also be creators.
The Missing Bits...
There are still some obvious 'marketing chunks' to be integrated into this Marketing Plan, including...
a) the use of social media for promotion of all marketing activities
b) merchadise / promotional materials (particularly for events)
c) marketing metrics - what needs to be measured to gauge progress, and how can the data be collected
d) language neutrality - marketing activities should be accessible to as many languages as possible. Non-native English speakers should be involved in all the groups.
Two other important marketing 'elements' that span across more or less all the targets are...
a) Steem Ambassador program - a team to act as the public face of Steem at events and conferences. This needs a post of its own to develop further but obvious candidates with experience in this area include @coruscate, @justineh, @crimsonclad, @starkerz and @anarcotech.
b) Small Grants Fund - the Steem Proposal System is likely not to be suitable for providing small adhoc amounts of money for example for the printing of 100 promotional t-shirts for an event or the purchase of train tickets to take people to speak at a crypto event. The proposal requirements, the timescales and the voting system will be too cumbersome. Therefore some sort of regularly topped up fund of maybe $5000 would be useful to cover small scale expenditure. Could that be built up through donations and post beneficiary rewards?
IN BIG LETTERS - this is not a definitive marketing plan. I am not a marketing expert of any description.
This is just a marker in the sand to get the juices flowing and the contributions incoming.
Pitch in and I will compile.
Thank you. It's 5am and time to sleep.
[ image by @pennsif ]
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https://steemit.com/steem/@manishmike10/new-steem-silent-marketing-and-rewarding-interactions-experimental
We keep talking about marketing, but when someone does it, no help.
That looks a useful approach. Do you have any follow up to help people sign up for Steem if they are interested?
When they comment about their interest i reply asap! Currently my recent insta post for engrave is going boom. Check it out for yourself.
That sounds good. I'm not on Instagram, but good work on that.
I am following you now to keep up to date with progress.
Thank you. My insta is business account. Soo I'll start paid promotion is contnue to get the community support and ofcourse the funds.
I've sent some upvotes from y @communityaction account - only small but hope it helps.
Tipping Steem in Reddit, Twitter, Facebook with TipBot along with referral code to create new account and guide to the very basics of Steem.
Airdrop Steem with CoinBase Earn project with educational videos.
Attend as many as crypto conference to talk about Steem.
Ads in CoinMarketCap (the most popular crypto-website)
More exchanges and add liquidity: Steem's volume is one of the lowest, on the other hand, ERC20 token based ICOs have one of the highest volume due to easy access to all the exchanges with ETH infrastructure. Success of one of the coins mostly depends of heavy volume. ABBC, MonaCoin, Nano all relatively useless coins but thriving due to high volumes. https://steemit.com/steemproposals/@prameshtyagi/multi-exchange-steem-market-maker-reposted-from-creator-account-in-order-to-submit-the-proposal
One of the biggest selling point is fee-less transactions. Advertise it everywhere. For example, it costed me 20 HUNT token to send 500 HUNT. To send HUNT, I need 24 cents equivalent of ETH as gas price to send it to an exchange. If I do 10 transfers, it will cost me $2.4, as each HUNT is 1 cents it is 240 HUNT. If HUNT were based on SMT then it would cost 0. So, if some of the top ICOs are switched to SMTs then it will bring lots of publicity.
However, for SMT to be succeed as ICOs, Steem needed to added 100s of exchanges where ETH, EOS or TRON are already there. It will require herculean effort. But it is worth it.
Some good ideas there.
Coinbase Ease would be a very good one - I wonder what the cost would be for Steem to get on that?
Exchanges are generally v expensive I believe.
Glad that you have joined the marketing mind trust! Appreciate your input. We need a great more eyes on this initiative introduced by @pennsif! Glad your 👀 are here! Marketing of STEEM needs all of our efforts and skills.
Thanks @sgt-dan - much appreciated.
Numbers 1 and 2 would be huge.
What about a bounty pool for targeted recruitment? The ROI associated with luring specific authors / personalities to use Steem over alternative platforms could be exponential. There are personalities on twitter with thousands of followers, but no real means of monetizing their community works / contributions in any significant way.
It could be as simple as leveraging a delegated pool of steem to offer and/or guarentee a baseline or minimum reward for their contributions for X amount of time in return for migrating and ultimately bringing their followers and providing advertising / marketing value to the platform. Engagement is key, I think this could be an extremely simple and effective part of the broader strategy outlined in your post. Let me know what you think. Thanks
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This is absolutely fantastic! A marketing plan is exactly what is needed! The other day I was looking at State of the DAPPS and noticed that @sportstalksocial was listed and ranked at #22 for all blockchains listed on that site! This is great news!
STEEM DAPPS of all kinds still rank well on State of the DAPPS. I would encourage all Developers and Tribes to check to see if they are listed and if not, submit their DAPP for inclusion.
I am very glad to see that someone is taking the initiative to propose a marketing plan. The outline you provided in this post is well thought out and fantastically presented! STEEM has had a script for GOOGLE to crawl Steem Posts for as long as I can remember, but our marketing needs a bit more than this small bit of SEO script.
I salute you sir for your research and the hard work that went into preparing this outstanding marketing plan!
Thank you @sgt-dan for your encouragement and support.
I hope this gets picked a bit more widely...
If a marketing proposal was put on SPS, I would definitely support it. I think we needed more marketing back in 2017. With everything that has happened this year, it's an absolute must. We also need a much greater push towards the non-crypto comnunities. Steem has something to offer almost anyone.
Thanks for the great post.
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Thank you for your support. I think this will need a fair bit of refinement before anything from it can forward to the SPS. Then it would just need over 13M SP support to get funding....
I've been saying we need marketing for years, but I wouldn't know how to do it myself apart from talking about Steem on social media and people can turn off if you do it too much. I think Steem has a good product, but there are a lot of misconceptions about it. It is anarchic, but it is also powerful.
The right pitch for the right people will be all important.
Not sure we have homed in on the winning combination yet.
I know from personal experience that big hackathons with 70+ contestants who compete in groups for price money is a very useful tool to get people interested.
If the payout would be in steem and they have to program steem related things... I think you get the picture.
I have never been to a hackathon. I wonder what resources would be needed to organise one...
You may not even need to organise one. I went to one this year where Large Sponsors chose the possible tasks to do with their enterprise/product. I won't dox my location here, but I'll send you a link to their site in discord!
Interesting, got the link thank you.
Hackathons look good...
I think that somebody need to take control over STEEM's presence on other social media sites as well. There are a few groups on facebook that are just full of spam and fake users. This is the biggest social media on the planet and should be used to share the best of STEEM.
News, blogs, videos from dtube, msp-radio shows. There needs to be a group of people covering all the major media sites and getting the content here in front of people's eyes. STEEM has a bad name but doesn't help itself by letting this happen. I've reported the fake STEEM facebook multiple times but someone needs to get it taken down as it's full of lies.
When I first joined Steem I believe Steemit Inc hired someone from the community ( @hilarski I think ) to run their social media. But then dropped him.
Don't think it has really been picked up since then...
There is definitely a major need!
I'll do it for a small amount of steem every month. It would barely cost them a thing at these prices and badly needed.
You should make Steemit Inc an offer they can't refuse...
I might have to. I already picked up accounts for steem-info on facebook and twitter a while back, just haven't done anything with them yet.
wow nice work @pennsif, we needed a start and you just gave us one. I'm delighted you thought of me in the lists and would happily help, time permitting. DM me on discord and let me know if there is interest in a follow up :-) . thanks :-)
Hi Paula - thanks for the comment and the support. I will message you.
Lo AME